Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (review)

This is an eclectic and provocative book that provides new insights into the meaning of the York Corpus Christi Play and the minds of its producers both medieval and modern. It opens with a discussion of the re-enactments of the York Cycle in the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey after 1951, combining an exploration of modern nostalgia for the Middle Ages with a consideration of the community response to the revival. The final section concentrates on less traditional twentieth-century presentations of "incarnational" theatre—that is theatre whose image structure centers on the Christian story and its theological implications—including Denys Arcand's film Jesus of Montreal. But the heart of the book is a consideration of the plays performed on Corpus Christi day in York (1376-1569) from a number of critical perspectives. "Social Relation and Symbolic Act" treats the plays as a community phenomenon in late medieval York; "Sacramental Theater" examines the sequence from the Trials to the Resurrection from a series of different theoretical perspectives suggesting that the body of Christ dramatized in the plays effectively replaced the host as the sacrament for the community; the remaining unit considers changes in the play after the Reformation.

Despite Beckwith's efforts in the introduction and in the later chapters to draw common threads from the disparate arguments, the book lacks a sense of unity. There are also several places where she has failed to take what is known about the details of the original setting of the play and the creation of the surviving text into sufficient account. Although there is no doubt that the emphasis on the bleeding body of Christ is a central feature of the York Plays and, indeed, of all the late medieval plays of the Passion and many other works of "affective piety," Beckwith overlooks the quasi-liturgical setting in which the plays were embedded for most of their life. She has not found a satisfactory way to negotiate the relationship between the symbolic significance of the civic Corpus Christi procession which, until 1468, preceded the plays and the plays themselves. The core of the procession was the reserved host—theologically the true body of Christ—carried in its magnificent reliquary surrounded by expensive candles and the members of the Corpus Christi Guild, preceded by the secular clergy and followed by the mayor and corporation. The reserved sacrament was not "the little host under clerical jurisdiction" (47) as Beckwith suggests, but a potent sacramental sign honored in a civic procession by the entire community. The plays complemented this display of "corporis Christi"; they did not replace it. When the procession was moved to the Friday after Corpus Christi in 1468, the city continued its control of the event until 1547, when the procession and the Guild of Corpus Christi were suppressed. However, at the point in the cycle when Mary ascends the throne, the mayor walked triumphantly in the procession "as Master of Corpuscrysty" reinforcing the continued centrality of the host. Beckwith's argument would have been greatly strengthened had she dealt with the ongoing presence of the host—a signifier more coherent and potent than the many actors portraying Christ over the day—in the communityliturgical procession until the last years of the play. Her argument that the body of the actor replaces the host in this "sacramental theatre" can be seen as valid in a modern production divorced from the world of late medieval piety, but to argue that the original producers and actors thought of the plays as anything more than a pale imitation of the reality of the host is not persuasive.

There are other places where arguments are marred by slippery and allusive implications that are not grounded in what we know about the history of the text. In her discussion of the undoubted Lollard...